


Whatever We Have Locked Up

by magnificentbastards



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, alcohol/drugs (a bit), dream weirdness, informal non-negotiated d/s, introspection but also the stubborn refusal to introspect, it's ronan. u know., self-destructive violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2015-07-07
Packaged: 2018-04-08 00:51:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4284381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnificentbastards/pseuds/magnificentbastards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Gansey finishes he runs a hand over Ronan's buzzcut like he's satisfied at a job well done. Ronan really wants to lean back into it. He doesn't, though. His bandaged hands are very still in his lap. The light from the sunset outside is burning orange through the huge windows, a dust storm at the end of the world.</p><p>That night he has good dreams, and wakes up with bruises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whatever We Have Locked Up

**Author's Note:**

> CUZ WE'VE TRIED HUNGRY AND WE'VE TRIED FULL  
> AND NOTHING SEEMS ENOUGH  
> SO TONIGHT TONIGHT  
> THE BOYS ARE GONNA GO FOR  
> [MORE MORE MORE](http://mitski.bandcamp.com/track/townie)

\--

Ronan Lynch spends his Sunday afternoon in the courtyard of Monmouth Manufacturing, destroying things. It has been exactly eleven days since the death of his father.

The first thing he does is burn stuff. Old classwork, clothes he doesn't wear any more, back copies of the Washington Post, children's books he finds in his room that he remembers his father reading to him, years and years ago now, sitting at the end of his bed and sending him to sleep; they spiral downwards like shot birds when he throws them out of the window, races down the stairs to meet them, kicks them into a pile in the middle where the dry grass has been scorched away and replaced with dark earth and stone. He found a half-full bottle of lighter fluid in the kitchen and he turns it upside down over the pile, feels the heavy _glug-glug-glug_ of it emptying in his hand like a cut vein bleeding out.

When he drops a lit match on the pile it ignites all at once with a low muffled rushing noise, sucking the heat out of the air and spitting it back intense and dangerous. Ronan's standing too close and the flames sputter towards his face, sparks landing on his arms and flaring bright and painful before they fade into dead ash. He stands too close, right where the heat is almost unbearable, won't let himself turn around. The contents of the bottle of white rum he brought with him from upstairs go alternately down his throat and onto the fire; the flames roar, hungry. The cops are probably going to come soon but whatever, whatever, let them.

About forty minutes later Ronan's finished the rum, thrown the bottle down hard onto the dying fire and watched the shards of glass glow white-hot, pulled at his hair so hard he can feel the strands break off in his fists, and punched the wall several times. He's learnt recently that you have to punch a wall really _hard_ to actually break your skin, but thankfully he's not starting from scratch – there's Thursday's scabs to knock off, Tuesday's wounds to reopen under them, and deeper underneath those are the nasty bruises from where his fist had connected with Declan's nose and jaw and nose again, six days ago in the garage at the Barns.

At that point, Gansey walks into the courtyard.

Ronan doesn't notice until he hears his name called, and then again, “Jesus Christ, Ronan,” and then, “Don't –” as he hits the wall for the third time. It hurts a lot. He's not sure he can stop. He turns to look at Gansey.

“Ronan,” says Gansey, “Stop it.”

Ronan stops.

Gansey takes him inside.

There's a lot of blood on Ronan's hands and his knuckles are dirty and gritty from the wall, or so Gansey tells him even though he can't really focus enough to see it. That's the rum, probably, not the pain; he drank a lot of it, because it's numbing, because Ronan Lynch is a lot of things but he's not fucking stupid. He wonders how bad the pain would be if it _wasn't_ numbed by the booze. Pretty bad, probably. He wonders if he could take it.

Gansey washes Ronan's hands in the sink and says “Sorry,” when Ronan winces, a clipped dispassionate kind of sorry like you'd say to a sick dog you were about to shoot. Gansey sits Ronan down on a pillow on the floor and bandages his hands, boxer-style, which Ronan thinks is probably funny or ironic or something. Gansey puts some kind of cold cream from a little screw-top tub on the bits of Ronan's skin that got burnt standing too close to the fire.

“I was breaking through everything, before,” says Ronan, nonsensical, as Gansey's rubbing the burn cream into his ankle, “So I just wanted something that wouldn't break. I needed something stronger than me that wouldn't break.”

Gansey says, “I won't.”

Later, as the sun goes down, Gansey sits on a chair next to Aglionby in the model Henrietta and Ronan leans back against his legs and Gansey shaves Ronan's head with a pair of electrical clippers. He's very methodical about it, straight lines one after the other along the curve of Ronan's skull. Ronan sits in silence as locks of burnt hair float down onto his legs and the ground.

When Gansey finishes he runs a hand over Ronan's buzzcut like he's satisfied at a job well done. Ronan really wants to lean back into it. He doesn't, though. His bandaged hands are very still in his lap. The light from the sunset outside is burning orange through the huge windows, a dust storm at the end of the world.

That night he has good dreams, and wakes up with bruises.

–-

“The dream stuff is better than the real stuff,” says Kavinsky conversationally, wiping his nose and then the dashboard, “'cause there's no wait and no comedown. And 'cause you don't know what the fuck it'll do to you! Ha. I could sell these kids anything, Lynch, they'd be sucking my dick for more.”

Ronan sniffs experimentally. Somewhere during the last sentence Kavinsky's hand had come down onto Ronan's thigh and it's still there now, fingers twitching a tighter grip and tap-tap-tapping, the dizzy impatience of a bomb waiting to detonate. If there's anything spinning Ronan's head right now it's the jetlag of a day spent jerking between dreams and reality, between night and day, the fact that he can't quite tell if he's awake or not; the drugs feel like more of an afterthought. He says nothing.

“I mean, I don't need to tell _you_ that, do I,” Kavinsky continues, as if he'd been too subtle before. His hand is very tight on Ronan's leg, like Ronan could feel the pulse in his fingers. The Mitsubishi purrs underneath them; it surprises Ronan that the engine is on, and then it surprises him that he'd somehow managed not to notice. He still says nothing. He doesn't want to be here. He's not sure he wants to be anywhere, though.

Somewhere high above them, thunder booms like landmines tearing the sky apart. It had been sunny earlier – probably – maybe – but he can't be sure. Everything is illuminated very briefly in the stark, jagged glow of crackling lightning: the graveyard of mutant cars, Kavinsky's horrible sunglasses, Ronan's pale knuckles. _Is that real? Can I have it? Can I watch?_

Kavinsky says, “Let's go for a ride.”

“Let's not,” says Ronan, and pops the green pill so fast he can feel it hit the back of his throat. It's like kicking through the convincingly painted cardboard wall of one movie set and emerging into another, covered in dust, interrupting the filming of an important scene. Like running and running but still being pulled back hard by the rope tied around his waist.

Anyway, there's a sickening kind of simplicity in the descent of the night horrors. There's nothing he can steal, no clever tricks he can pull out of his sleeve at the last minute, no show he needs to put on. It's just this: they come, they kill him, he wakes up. And Gansey wouldn't be disappointed in him for it, he thinks, his last real thought before the outstretched claws of the first monster reach him; Gansey wouldn't think less of him like he would if he saw where Ronan's real body is right now, what he's been putting into it. Gansey would just want to stop it from hurting.

–-

Ronan dreams he's in Cabeswater and it's early summer: moss cushioning his bare feet, his skin feeling alive, _organic,_ like it's going to sprout leaves and buds wherever the light touches it. Above his head the trees murmur a greeting, picked up by the breeze and echoed thirty feet above his head. Ronan wonders if there'll be a plot to this dream – last night, he and Adam had floated like bubbles between the upper branches of the trees, looking for an evasive white raven which they'd finally found perched at the top of the tallest pine. Ronan had reached for it, missed, reached again, and woken up clutching a single albino feather, which he'd handed it to Adam that morning before Latin. Adam had pocketed it and given Ronan a brief, private smile.

The trees open up into the path down to the pool and the hollow tree, and Ronan follows it down, stepping easily over roots and rocks. When he glances up again, Gansey's standing in the pool. He's facing away but Ronan knows it's him, with that certainty particular to dreams, and just as he thinks it Gansey turns and walks out of the water. He'd been submerged up to the waist but his legs are perfectly dry on land, and behind him the surface of the pond is bubbling lazily, like a pot coming to the boil.

Ronan opens his mouth to say hi and no words come out. Puzzled, he tries again; the same thing happens, just an open mouth and silent air. The trees hiss around him, not urgent yet but ominous. Behind Gansey, the bubbling of the pool is turning wilder, like a school of fish thrashing just under the surface. Something rises slowly out of the water. It takes Ronan a minute to parse the shape, this torn sodden dark figure, and it's only when the light glints off shiny wet claws that he realises.

His shouts come out silent. Gansey just looks at him. The trees _howl,_ muffled and frightening, and Ronan leaps forward down the last slope of the hill and across the clearing even as he knows he won't make it in time, even as the night horror emerges fully from the water, rises into the air, raises its jagged claws towards the boy in front of it.

Gansey turns on the spot and claps his hands sharply; the monster falls unmoving to the ground and disappears.

Ronan stops and stares.

Gansey steps easily around where the shattered body should have been, crosses the soft grass to stand in front of Ronan. He extends a hand, places it at the top of Ronan's chest so his fingers dig a little into the indent of Ronan's collarbone. The trees, calm and still again, whisper. The moss feels like it's the only thing holding Ronan upright, and even then just barely.

“You just have to be firm with them,” says Gansey, moving forwards. “It's the same with you.”

The dream changes: Gansey, his face lit in flickering chiaroscuro by the burning shells of cars on either side of him, hefting the molotov in his hand to test its weight. The flame reflected in his glasses, his eyes hidden. Someone – many someones – shouting encouragement from behind them. Gansey snaps his fingers and somehow it's audible above the crackle and roar of the fires and the howls of the raucous assembly. Ronan drops to his knees, doesn't even think about it, watches as the flame from the burning bottle twines itself round Gansey's arm like a tame snake.

Gansey's hand is perfectly cool where he holds Ronan's jaw still so the twining fire can roll down his outstretched arm and wrap itself around Ronan's throat. It's hot as melted wax, painful. He loves it. He doesn't want it to end.

When Gansey's fingers brush his bottom lip Ronan opens his mouth

and wakes up in one great shuddering gasp, sticky with sweat, his fists clenched in the sheets, grasping for something entirely absent from his reach.

–-

Adam comes over so they can do homework together, which is a stupid mundane keeping-an-eye-on-Ronan errand that he's almost definitely been sent on by Gansey. Adam doesn't admit to that, though, which Ronan appreciates a bit, and he shows up holding a coffee in each hand, which Ronan also appreciates (and plans to secretly slip a five-dollar bill into Adam's bag for, when he's not looking), and he lets Ronan listen to weird-ass electronic music without complaining. It's nice to see him, actually, even if they're mostly only talking about verb declensions and trying to stop Chainsaw shitting on their notebooks.

Neither of them talk about Gansey in their breaks from work that evening. He's out of town til the next morning, showing his All-American Golden Boy face at some family thing. It's making Ronan itchy, especially as Noah's fucked off again so he had to throw all the plates in the kitchen out of the window _alone_ earlier, which is markedly not as fun, and now he needs to go buy more plates before Gansey notices.

“Shit,” he says, two hours in, stretching his arms above his head and yawning, “I can hand this in half-done, right? Any teacher with half a brain can tell I'm smarter than the average little shrivelled-dick banker's kids at that school, that should count for something.”

“Doesn't count for GPA, though,” says Adam, but he's smiling a little. “I'm done, anyway.”

“Cool, now you can finish mine.”

“Ha _ha_. I couldn't even, I've got work in a half hour, I can't stay. But – look, if you need me to come over later...”

“No, come on,” says Ronan. “Whatever. I'm going to be very busy sitting by the window with my sewing and my butter churn, waiting for Gansey to return from the war.”

Adam smiles a little at that, but he's frowning as he packs his stuff away, looking preoccupied. Ronan slurps ineffectively at the dregs of his coffee, watching as Adam shrugs his bag over his shoulder, gives Chainsaw a single awkward stroke on the top of her head, and stands up to go.

“– Hey,” Adam says finally, standing halfway out Ronan's door. When Ronan raises an eyebrow, questioning, Adam continues, “You know why I don't live here, right?”

“Sure. Noble Adam Parrish pulls himself up by his greasy bootstraps. No hand-outs for noble Adam Parrish, darling of the American conservative movement.”

Adam rolls his eyes, the usual response to that line of teasing. “Yeah, okay, that, but it's also because – Gansey collects things, you know? He makes things his own. Don't you think if he dropped off the face of the planet, history would just _change_ and there never would have been any semi-mythological fifteenth century Welsh king for anyone to research in the first place? Glendower is very... _his,_ now, whatever it was before Gansey started looking.”

His tone is more contemplative than it's been all evening, that manner Adam has about him that makes Ronan think you could see the cogs turning in his head if your eyes were only a little sharper. He's not sure it bodes particularly well. From the window ledge, Chainsaw squawks. Ronan says, “She says hurry it up, she wants dinner.”

“Okay, okay. I can't imagine anything worse than being something in Gansey's collection, having his – his stamp on me. Don't tell me that's not how it would be, because that's not the point of this conversation. What I mean is, I work three shitty jobs partly to avoid becoming one of the _things_ that Gansey _owns_ , see. But you...” He tilts his head to one side; the light makes his hair look silver-white, his face washed-out. “The idea doesn't bother you at all, does it?”

Ronan looks at him for a while. Adam, unusually, doesn't look away.

“Smart kid, Parrish,” says Ronan eventually. He's grinning, not particularly nicely. Some low-down conscientious part of him hopes Adam can tell that Ronan's spite is directed inwards, not outwards; he probably can, anyway, because isn't he a  _smart goddamned kid._

“That's what they tell me. See you later, Ronan,” Adam replies, and disappears through the door.

Ronan flicks his speakers back on, turns the volume up high ( _see you on a dark night – see you on a dark night – see you on a dark night_ ), presses his forehead against the window pane, and says, “Fuck.”

–-

The end of July sees Henrietta shrouded in sticky heat, the a/c turned to full blast everywhere, everyone outdoors clinging like fugitives to the sliver of shade where the sidewalk meets the building. Ronan gets back to Monmouth at six, jerks his curtains shut, clears a space on his bedroom floor by kicking shit haphazardly into the corners, and spends the evening working out. This is how Gansey eventually walks in unannounced (a hanging offence from anyone else, supposedly one from Gansey too but here they are) and finds him, well after nightfall: shirtless, on his eighty-ninth push-up, drenched in sweat.

Embarrassment is one of what Ronan considers his Dead Emotions, but if it was still alive in him he thinks it'd be stirring now. He feels like everyone's got the wrong idea about what they probably see as his hypermasculine tendencies; that they're defensive posturing or internalised homophobia or fratricidal alpha-male aspirations or shit like that. The truth is, unusually, simpler. Ronan likes driving flashy cars because it'd be inconvenient to get places via rollercoaster, or to ride around on a vicious, half-trained tiger, so the BMW is the next best thing. Ronan exercises a lot because his muscles feel better when they're strained and burning than when they aren't, and because physical exhaustion is the closest he can come to shutting off his brain most of the time. Ronan has that tattoo because – well.

He doesn't say any of this, obviously. What he says is, all insincerity, “Don't you knock? I'm not decent.”

“Are you ever?” asks Gansey.

Ronan shifts back so he's sitting, legs askew, leaning on the balls of his hands, facing Gansey. He's got a nasty pain twisting between his shoulder blades, a satisfying ache in his upper arms telling him to push it further. He doesn't move to put a shirt on and Gansey doesn't ask him to. He says, “Could you pass the-” and then gestures to his tangled pile of leather wristbands, flung down by the door.

Gansey hands them over. The brush of their hands, the way Gansey watches behind his glasses as Ronan re-ties the straps around his arm, feels like it means something. Ronan doesn't dwell on it, though; most things Gansey does feel like they mean something.

“I wondered if-” says Gansey, and then interrupts himself, “What on earth are you listening to?”

The speakers pulse out ocean noises and mumbled, incomprehensible words above a dirty bass beat. Ronan says, “It's the Sensory Deprivation Tank Remix.”

“I think you have discovered the precise opposite of easy listening,” Gansey pronounces. “This is... this is _difficult listening_.”

“You have no idea.” Ronan, by all rights, ought to feel annoyed that his work-out session was interrupted. And he does, kinda, but it's dawning on him that the off-time he finds in his burning lungs and heightened heartbeat hasn't actually ended as his body cools down – the stormclouds have retreated from the inside of his head but they're not coming back yet, not like they usually do. He feels awake, present, not particularly like he wants to sweep the contents of his shelves on the floor and set them on fire. It's weird. He knows _why_ it is, though, because he's not a fucking idiot, and he glances away as he reaches up to rub at the ache in his shoulders.

“Your back's still hurting?” Gansey asks, frowning.

“When you say it like that it makes me sound senile,” says Ronan. “It's fine. Just kind of like getting stabbed with a big knife right between my shoulder blades. Therapeutic, even.”

“I've never met anyone so willing to just _not do anything_ about physical pain,” says Gansey lightly, and then frowns and corrects himself; “Oh. Except Adam.”

“The symptom's the same but the illnesses are not,” Ronan says, which is true. Adam's stoic through pain; he shuts down and keeps running on autopilot. Ronan's reactions – Ronan's reactions couldn't be more different if he tried. Either way it makes both of them pretty fucked up, though, so.

“Look, d'you want me to get it?” asks Gansey, gesturing vaguely with one hand to Ronan's back. “Helen took a massage course in Boston once, she taught me when I pulled a muscle rowing last year, I've probably not forgotten it yet.”

“Oh, Dicky, I thought you'd never ask,” says Ronan, batting his eyelashes, but he's thinking _please please please yes please yes yes please_ so fast he's surprised it doesn't spill out of his mouth.

Gansey snorts. “If you're going to be like that I'll retract the offer,” he says, stepping over the piles of crumpled old Latin homework sheets and wrinkled shirts by the door. “Sit up straight. It's probably your bad posture that's causing these problems, you know.”

Ronan sits up straight.

“Good boy,” says Gansey, his voice unreadable. The problem is they're too wrapped up, in layers and layers of ironies, insincerities, boys with public personas that are hard to drop, boys wearing secrets like second skins. Gansey's a liar, raised the best there is. Ronan doesn't lie, sure, but he rarely tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth: here, the drop in the pit of his stomach, the heat of his body, his nails digging hard into the palms of his hands. Good dog, bad dog _._

Gansey sits behind him on the bed, his knees against Ronan's back, one hand on each of Ronan's shoulders. Gansey's hands are big and robust and capable; it's easy to imagine them banging a gavel, signing bills into law, wet and straining on the oars of the first-class Aglionby team boat.

When Gansey's thumbs press hard into the skin and muscle of his shoulders Ronan drops his head back on instinct, lets out a long ragged breath he hadn't realised he was holding. The beat of the stereo has turned dreamy, synth-heavy, the kind of music to fall into a trance to.

Gansey's feet weigh anchor either side of Ronan, his bare ankles brushing the naked skin of Ronan's hips. Gansey's hands work at the ache in Ronan's back like it's a puzzle no one else could possibly solve, like he treats every problem he comes up against, and Ronan's kind of glad, actually, biting his lip, that they can't see each other's faces right now. And he's glad Gansey isn't being gentle with this, like he could be, like someone else might be. Ronan doesn't want to be treated delicately. Ronan barely wants to be treated like a person deserving of basic human decency, which is probably as fucked up as the pain thing, whatever. Whatever. _You incredible creature._ Right now what Ronan wants is to push back and meet resistance that's stronger than he is.

Gansey pushes his thumbs in hard, right where it hurts, digging his fingers into the top of Ronan's shoulders to get purchase. Ronan can feel Gansey leaning over him, Gansey's breath on the back of his neck. He arches his spine into Gansey's hands, can't help gasping in an unsteady breath through clenched teeth, embarrassing _,_ fuck, _whatever –_ Gansey pauses, lets up the pressure but keeps his hands where they are, and asks, “Am I hurting you?”

“Yeah,” says Ronan, and he wonders if Gansey's seeing his curled toes, his knuckles pale where he's holding onto his own crossed ankles.

Gansey strokes a thumb very slowly along the base of Ronan's neck, tracing a line of ink. “Would you like me to stop?”

“Really,” says Ronan, his breath coming short, sweat prickling his bare chest, “ _really_ not.”

Gansey says, “Good boy.”

\--

**Author's Note:**

> ronan's listening to [grimes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhs8JWTpKOc) (obvs) and [shinoby](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZmvewWYAEs) and various other stuff - nina kraviz maybe, or korridor. we went on a journey to the weird techno part of youtube together.
> 
> the title is from the song [lipstick covered magnet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMsDDZrtaeI) by the front bottoms and the epigram is from the song [townie](http://mitski.bandcamp.com/track/townie) by mitski both of which you oughta check out imo. for what it's worth i have this file saved as "f is for friends who do stuff together.docx" 
> 
> it's been ages since i wrote fanfic & i had lots of fun with this & i hope you enjoyed reading it!


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